I have a couple of large appliances I want to monitor power on for a week or so just to get a handle on how much they are costing me to operate. I dont really wanna go to the trouble of setting up an external data logger/grapher for HE so I figure I am stuck with getting a "WiFi" plug that has its own app that will graph/analyze the data for me. Seems like Smartbot plugs will do the job and they are reasonably inexpensive but figured I would ask if anyone has a recommendation? I would like whatever I get to at least work with HE for on/off so they are useful after my little experiment.
Looks like there used to be a HE app for graphing stuff like this but it seems like its abandoned now. Is there anything I missed that might let me collect data from the Zigbee/Zwave devices I already have without going outside of HE? All I really want to know is "Fridge used XXX kwh over 7 days" nothing to fancy.
Why not just purchase " Kill A Watt" to measure the power usage of each appliance one at a time? It is a pretty simple, all-in-one device, that will allow you to determine the energy usage/cost of any single device. Then, simply move it to another device and start the process again.
I personally use an IoTaWatt whole home energy monitoring system, with current transformers attached to each of my circuit breakers in the electrical panel. It works great, but is quite a bit more expensive, and requires significant installation effort. I just recently analyzed some of the data for our house and found the following.
The original app was abandoned, but all of the graphing capability from that app is now in Webcore, which is part of HE.
I have a whole house energy monitor and individual smart plugs on various appliances.
Some of the stuff I setup using webcore graphing. Each graph can be double clicked and it goes full screen. My individual graphs showing the monthly cost did take a bit of time getting all the rules setup. If I just displayed energy usage only then webcore can do that without much fuss. Converting the energy levels to monthly cost was a fairly extensive task.
The original app was abandoned, but it was integrated into webcore.
I realll would give a cloud base influxdb and grafana a look as well. Setting up influxdb logger to write to a influxdb free cloud account is pretty easy. Then setting up a free cloud grafana account to graph from that Influxdb cloud account is easy. Only potential issue may be creating a graph, but maybe we can coax @jtp10181 to help with that. He has created a thread of prebuilt dashboards that are great.
I never really had a chance to test my original water heater, and I wondered how much a tankless really saves you. Didn't really have any real world examples to compare. Our electrical rate is only .1055/kWh and our tankless is gas but it used $1.89 in electric over the last year, and we use a about $18 a month in gas. Our cook top is gas as well. So I figure the water heater is probably 80% of that cost.
So the Tankless is probably costing use about $175/yr, seems like a decent savings. Your other cost seem in line with mine. Our washing machine cost us $4.52, and our dishwasher about $28.00. Don't have a full year on the dishwasher as we just replaced it in June, so that is based on average cost over the last four months.. It's just the two of us. If you have more people in your household then the saving may not be as much as that.
Hmm... I have Innr, Third Reality, and Ikea Zigbee plugs and none of them have detailed information like the zooz driver. Anyone know of a zigbee version that has info like this? That is really all I need.
If not its probably worth just getting the Zooz even though one of them is the same price as 4 of the Zigbee ones.
I think the TR plug supports the energy stats but the built in driver is so generic it only supports power readings. There is a driver I think that unlocks it, looking now. Found it on his Github, having problems finding the forums post for some reason: https://github.com/bradsjm/hubitat-public/tree/main/ThirdReality . Luckily I have some of these devs usernames memorized @jonathanb do you have a post for your driver somewhere? I am having a heck of a time finding anything about it on here.
Wasnt there an app someone was working on the take the power info and calculate the costs?
Found it, [No Longer Maintained] Energy Cost Calculator
Not sure if this app requires the "energy" attribute or if it can estimate based on the "power" and the timing of the events.
Random thought, with just a copy/paste dump of the power events, including the event time and power reading, wouldn't it be pretty easy to just make an excel spreadsheet to calculate the kWh?
